Nina knew the spot as soon as she saw it—a copse of trees by the riverbank, a place where travelers might come to rest and where the water eddied as if the river were resting too. Here, she told herself as she dismounted and untied a shovel and pick from the sledge. Here.
It took her hours to dig. Adrik couldn’t help with the task, but he used his power to keep the wind from tearing at her clothes and to shelter the lantern when the sky began to dim.
Nina wasn’t certain how deep to dig, but she went on until she was sweating in her coat, until her hands blistered, and then until the blisters broke. When she stopped, panting, Adrik did not wait for her signal but began to untie the tarp on the sledge. Nina made herself help him, forced herself to move aside the boxes and gear that hid their true cargo. Here.
Matthias was wrapped in linen specially treated by the Fabrikators at the Little Palace to preserve him from decay, and reinforced by Leoni’s craft. Nina thought of pulling the linen aside, of glimpsing his cherished face one more time. But she couldn’t bear the idea of seeing his features still and cold, his skin gray. It was bad enough that she had the memory of his blood on her hands forever, the wound beneath her palms, his heart going still. Death was supposed to be her friend and ally, but death had taken him just the same. She could at least try to remember him as he’d been.
Awkwardly, Nina and Adrik rolled his body from the edge of the cart. It was huge and heavy. He tumbled into the tomb with a horrible thud.
Nina covered her face with her hands. She had never been more grateful for Adrik’s silence.
Lying in the well of the grave, Matthias’ body looked like a chrysalis, as if he were at the beginning of something, instead of the end. He and Nina had never exchanged gifts or rings; they’d had no possessions they shared. They had been wanderers and soldiers. Even so, she could not leave him with nothing. From her pocket, she drew a slender sprig of ash and let it drift down into the grave, followed by a smattering of withered red petals from the tulips their compatriots had placed on his chest when they bid him goodbye in Ketterdam.
“I know you never cared for sweets.” Her voice wobbled as she let a handful of toffees fall from her hand. They made a hollow patter. “But this way I’m with you, and you can keep them for me when I see you next. I know you won’t eat them yourself.”
She knew what came now. A handful of earth. Another. I love you, she told him, trying not to think of the graceless sound of the soil, like the rattle of shrapnel, like sudden bursts of rain. I loved you.
Her eyes blurred from the tears. She couldn’t see him any longer. The earth rose higher. There would be snow soon, maybe even tonight. It would cover her work, a burial shroud, white and unmarred. And when spring came, the snow would melt and find its way through the soil and carry Matthias’ spirit to the river, to Djel. He would be with his god at last.
“Will you take the sledge back to camp?” she asked Adrik. There were still things she needed to say, but only to Matthias.
Adrik nodded and glanced up at the darkening sky. “Just don’t be too long. A storm’s coming.” Good, she thought. Let the snow come soon. Let it cover our work here.
Nina knelt on the cold ground, listening to the hoofbeats of Adrik’s horse fade. She could hear the rush of the river, feel the damp of the earth through the heavy wool of her skirts. The water hears and understands. The ice does not forgive. Fjerdan words. The words of Djel.
“Matthias,” she whispered, then cleared her throat and tried again. “Matthias,” she said more loudly. She wanted him to hear her, needed to believe he could. “Oh Saints, I don’t want to leave you here. I don’t want to leave you ever.” But that was not the hero’s eulogy he deserved. She could do this for him. Nina drew a long, shaky breath. “Matthias Helvar was a soldier and a hero. He saved me from drowning. He kept us both alive on the ice. He endured a year in the worst prison in the world for a crime he didn’t commit. He forgave me for betraying him. He fought beside me, and when he could have abandoned me, he turned his back on the only country he’d ever known instead. For that, he was branded a traitor. But he wasn’t. He believed his country could be more than it had been. He lived with honor and died with it too.” Her voice broke and she forced the waver away from it. She wanted to be dignified in this moment. She wanted to give him that. “He wasn’t always a good man, but he had a good heart. A great, strong heart that should have kept beating for years and years.”
Little red bird, let me go.
She wiped the tears from her eyes. This was the first half of her debt paid. She’d brought him home to the land he loved. There should be something to mark this moment, a bell to toll, a choir to sing for him, something so she knew it was time to say her last goodbye.
But you’re not done yet, my love.
“You and your sense of duty,” she said on a bitter laugh.
The whispers rose inside her head. She didn’t want to hear them now, not here.
Listen, Nina.
She did not want to, but she knew she could hide from them no longer—the voices of the dead, calling to her, down the mountain, through the town, over the ice. The voices of women, of girls, anguish in their hearts. Something had happened to them on that hilltop.
Help us, they cried. Hear us at last.
The words were clear now, and they were drowning out Matthias’ voice. Stop, she told them. Leave us alone. Leave me be.
But the dead did not relent. Justice, they demanded, justice.
This was no hallucination. It wasn’t madness either. The chorus was real, and they had brought her here for a reason. Nina had hoped her mission with Adrik and Leoni would be enough to start healing. It hadn’t been. But the girls on the mountain would not be denied.
Justice. They had brought her this far—and they needed her to listen to them, not the echo of a love she could not hold on to.
Nina placed a hand to her heart then as the ache inside her broke, the ice giving way. There was only dark water beneath, the terrible pain of knowing he was truly gone, the awful understanding that she would never hear his voice again.
Because the chorus was real.
But Matthias’ voice was not. It never had been.
“You were never here,” she whispered, the tears coming hard now. “You were never here.” All this time, she had wanted to believe that he was still with her, but it had been her voice all along, talking herself through the silence, forcing herself to do the work of living when all she wanted was to let go.
Goodbye, Matthias.
No one answered. She was alone in the silence.
“WE CAN CALL THEM BACK,” said Genya, pacing before the fire. “It’s not too late. We send messengers and just tell the girls and their families there’s been a change in plans.”
They’d gathered in the war room this morning, and Nikolai had called for coffee instead of tea. He’d developed a taste for it during his university days in Ketterdam. Though, between his exhaustion and the headache that had plagued him since the incident in Balakirev the previous night, he wouldn’t have minded something stronger in his cup.
The incident. What a generous turn of phrase. Tolya had filled him in on every grim detail of his little display in the bell tower. He’d almost murdered one of his most valued generals, one of his only true friends, the person who had helped him to steer this cursed ship of a country for two years, who had kept his secrets and whom he had trusted to do so without question. He had almost killed Zoya.